David Nield's posts - English uPOST

You’re probably spending more than you think on monthly subscription services—music streaming, cloud storage, video libraries, software packages... the list goes on and on. Add them all up and you might be talking about a substantial chunk of money going out on a regular basis. Here’s how to start cutting back.

Between read-it-later services, social media feeds, and the unbelievable speed at which a Google search can find the exact information you’re looking for, browser bookmarks have become a forgotten a relic of a previous internet age. But the basic bookmarking tools built into your browser can still be hugely useful in…

You use your smartphone a lot, we’re sure of that, but you’re probably just touring round the same apps and the same settings day after day. Are you aware of everything your pocketable mobile device is capable of? Here are 11 features you might have missed that should come in useful somewhere down the line.

It’s lunchtime—or maybe it’s just a break you’re taking from the world. Either way, you’ve got an hour to spare, and that could mean running errands or braving the outdoors, or it could mean snacking at your desk while idly clicking around the internet (employer IT policy permitting). If you’re looking for inspiration…

If you’re serious about using macOS to its full potential, then you need to be serious about making the most of the Dock—and that means tweaking and customizing it to suit your workflow, the apps you need, and the way you use your Mac. Here’s how to get the macOS Dock set up the right way for you.

In the next few months alone, movie locker service Ultraviolet and social network experiment Google+ are closing their doors for good, while photo sharing platform Flickr is shifting the rules about free and paid-for accounts. The moral of the story? Even digital services don’t stick around forever—but you can protect…

The Start menu is your way into Windows and the web—it’s where you find your apps and start your searches, where you go to customize the system and organize your digital life. It’s the hub of everything you do on your Windows computer, so don’t settle for the default configuration: Make the Start menu your own.

Phone or tablet tethering can give you some precious internet connectivity when you’re out of wifi range, and in terms of connecting on the go, it’s much more secure than the public wifi you’ll find in hotels, coffee shops, and so on. Here’s how to do it, simply and painlessly, whether you’ve got Android or iOS on…

It can be hard to keep up with all the features being added to all the apps you’ve got on your phone—which is why we’ve pulled together this rundown of recently added or particularly obscure features you might not have noticed in the apps you use every day. From staying safe in an Uber to undoing your Gmail mistakes,…

You probably spend a lot of your computing time traveling across the web in your browser of choice, which means any ways of speeding up that browser time is going to add a serious boost to your productivity. Install these extensions to supercharge your browsing and get everything done on the web that little bit…

While often derided as buggy, slow, and not as good as alternative options like the Apple TV or even the Chromecast, Android TV has been quietly fixing a lot of its problems and adding a pile of features that make it worth a second look. Nearly five years after launch, there are a lot of reasons Android TV might be…

Sometimes it feels like the operating system doesn’t matter. Sure, the fans will always be there ready and willing for a debate, but for most of us, there’s little difference between using Windows or macOS. Most of our day-to-day computing is happening in a web browser—and those are pretty universal at this point. The…

As our phones become ever more powerful and smart, their capabilities are increasing—so much so that we’re using them more and more like computers these days (quite literally sometimes). It also means Android and iOS are becoming better at multitasking, and here are the best ways of speeding through whatever it is you…

Apple isn’t known for its web apps, though you can now access a lot of its core apps (in basic form) through iCloud on the web. It doesn’t include Apple Music, but Apple does make APIs available for the service that other programmers can hook into—and that means there are now several third-party online players for…

The calendar has to be one of the most-used apps on any smartphone—keeping track of appointments, birthdays, vacations, and more—but if you’ve stuck with the one Apple or Google gives you on your phone then you’re missing out. These are five of the best alternative calendar apps that give you something more.

Partitioning your hard drive sounds like a technically involved task that most people don’t need to bother with—but it’s actually relatively simple to do, doesn’t have to cost you any money, and can make your computing life easier and more productive. Here are the advantages of a partitioned hard drive, and why you…

Apple and Google compete in a whole host of areas, from mobile operating systems to music platforms, so it follows that they have competing streaming media protocols as well—something that we’ve been hearing plenty about at CES 2019. But how exactly do these technologies work? And how do they stack up against each…

It’s fair to say that the Touch Bar—that little display strip above the keyboard on newer MacBook Pro laptops—hasn’t been the most successful of Apple’s recent attempts at innovation. It mostly sits unloved and unneeded, sacrificing keys that were useful for not much benefit. There are apps that try to make the most…

A lot of what we do on our computers goes through the browser, and that means any extensions you choose to add on top of that browser have a very privileged position: They can see where you’re going online, they can see the data you’re passing to and from the web, and they can send and receive data themselves.

We live in an age of super-smart technology built to make our lives easier, so don’t struggle with the menial chores of the day when your phone could be doing the job for you. Here are some of the best automations you can set up on your phone, freeing you from the task and giving you more time to do something else…